I checked glquake once more and the issue is that directsound is slowing glquake down.
For the benches I had no soundcard installed, now it is with the K5 at 1.5x75 MHz (112.5 MHz) like this:
glquake 0.97, 3dfx minigl 1.40, 640x480x16
-nosound 49.9 fps
normal with directsound 24.2 fps
-wavonly 47.4 fps
And I can't hear a difference when using wavout. So maybe just try -wavout for sound and see if it runs much faster (196 % compared to directsound).

elianda wrote:

I checked glquake once more and the issue is that directsound is slowing glquake down. For the benches I had no soundcard instal […]
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I checked glquake once more and the issue is that directsound is slowing glquake down.
For the benches I had no soundcard installed, now it is with the K5 at 1.5x75 MHz (112.5 MHz) like this:
glquake 0.97, 3dfx minigl 1.40, 640x480x16
-nosound 49.9 fps
normal with directsound 24.2 fps
-wavonly 47.4 fps
And I can't hear a difference when using wavout. So maybe just try -wavout for sound and see if it runs much faster (196 % compared to directsound).

Interesting. Too bored to install it back in right now, but interesting nonetheless.
Why does DirectSound slow it down like that?

It is related to the sound card driver. If I use a SB Live! 1024 I get 46.2 fps with directsound and 48.4 fps with -wavonly.

elianda wrote:

So I tried Descent 2 with ESS Audiodrive + General Midi and the result is: 320x200 62 fps 640x480 23 fps 800x600 16 fps […]
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So I tried Descent 2 with ESS Audiodrive + General Midi and the result is:
320x200 62 fps
640x480 23 fps
800x600 16 fps

I also tried Age of Empires and it runs like a charm, well the Requirements are originally:
Pentium 90 processor or faster (P-133+ for 1024 x 768 resolution) - slightly faster K5 PR166
SVGA with 1 MB RAM - welll the Voodoo4 has 32 MB.
fast 2D graphics card (2 MB required for 1024 x 768)
16 MB RAM - 64 MB
Win 95 or Win NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 - Win98SE, actually Win98 was not released when AoE was released.

So this game is no problem at all.

The sad thing is, Dosbox on my netbook runs MUCH worse than this. I get 30 fps in Descent 2, with lowest details in 320x200 with drops to 12 fps in every fight. I'd freaking sell my kidney for a nice retro rig like yours but my family already sees me as crazy because i like old PC games so...

Descent 2 in 320x200 runs about right on your machine, as framerates over 100 fps send the game haywire. I've read that some players in the late 90s cheated online and on LAN parties by setting low details, 320x200 and small window on Pentium II 450 Mhz to get over 500 fps, which means that guiding missiles becomes ridiculously easy. I know they beat top players this way even if they were noobs. Worst thing is, technically it wasn't cheating as they "only" exploited the game engine.

Can you try the 3dfx patch on Descent 2 please?

Nakhri, honestly, I don't see the point why people ran games that were not supposed for their hardware, perhaps the reason why I have a good experience with all computers is that I mostly play games that I like and that run on the computer properly, I never bothered with things like running Quake 2 on a Pentium 1, I mostly played RTS games, action RPGs, city simulators, classic 2.5D shooters, "360 degree" shooters like Descent 1 and 2 on my old Pentium 1 laptop, those games don't require messing with powerful CPUs or 3D cards and to be honest have aged far better than old Quake style 3D shooters. Quake 2 seems pointless IMHO in this day and age (especially because it threw the gothic Quake 1 atmosphere out the window and substituted it with generic sci-fi), but Age of Empires, Duke 3D, Fallout or Transport Tycoon can still make you fail an exam today 😀 .

Does anyone have MDK by any chance? Supposedly the game is playable even on a Pentium 90 in software mode despite having quite advanced 3D graphics for its time. It also has a benchmark mode.

Btw Nakhri if you wanna do more benchmarks, turn lvl 1 cache back on, as turning it off severely cuts the performance perhaps even below 486 level (I know that even in 500 Mhz systems turning off L1 cache can bring the performance in say System Shock 2 from 40+ fps to 0.5 fps without even undeclocking the CPU), this can be useful when running early 1990s and late 80s games through.

Ofc i,m not using the processor with it's L1 cache turned off,i just said that turning it off,fixed the integer error with those games.

I do have MDK, apparently it runs great on anything Pentium, even Pentium 60/66 (relatively great at least 😜).
In fact a Pentium 90 is the recommended system. I might give it a spin sometime, but there is a demo available that basically lets you do whatever the full version does including benchmarking! 😀

Ok I tried Descent2 3dfx started from Win98SE and in normal game it caps at 60 fps.
If I run the demo however in very intense combat it drops to 32 fps minimum fps, with not much action it is well over 100 fps.

I also tested Unreal and with 640x480 I can still get about 17.34 fps in timedemo1. This is with Shiny Surfaces and Corona, Sound and Music. I think this is quite impressive for 112.5 MHz. (all nice features off in 640x480 it does 18.3 fps)
In certain situations it is however too low to play.

Thanks for the information. Doeesn't Descent 2 have a vsync on/off option? BTW AFAIK Unreal has a 320x240, 400x300 and 512x384 option, can you try those? Without "nice eye candy options", of course.

512x384 might be doable without the fancy stuff that would kill the CPU. Not bad though. Elianda, have you set the sound quality at 11KHz? That's what Epic suggested for non-MMX CPUs. Gotta love the read-me of that game, always a joy to read. I think sound in general might be killing the CPU, try lowering the amount of channels to something like 8. This should help the CPU focus on other stuff 😀

512x384 is the lowest glide mode I can choose, the gain is just about 0.5 fps
I set sound to 22050 Hz, DirectSound off, Filter Off, Reverb Off, Surround Off, Effect Channels 4.
11 kHz did not make a difference, also Low Quality did not made a difference.

Music off gain is 0.3 fps.
As I said with all off and 640x480 I got 18.3 fps. So there is not much room left 😉.
So this is just a number, as I wont play Unreal on this sytem.

I guess a K5 PR200 could be pushed to the range of playable frame rate, but a P2 is still recommended 😉.

Seeing that it is such a good CPU, why was the myth that it is just a "souped up 486" born and propagated (especially seeing on the Computer Gaming World magazine scans)?

m1so wrote:

Seeing that it is such a good CPU, why was the myth that it is just a "souped up 486" born and propagated (especially seeing on the Computer Gaming World magazine scans)?

AMD had problems building it and it was horribly delayed. It was like a year behind the Pentium curve. Intel was pushing Pentium 200 when K5 was at PR100. AMD was thus forced to sell them dirt cheap since performance was so behind.

If PR200 had been out when Pentium 166-200 was king, things may have looked different. But PR200 didn't show until just before K6.

Yeah, Intel's primary antagonist during those days was Cyrix and their 6x86 CPUs. I think the PR133 model came out in late 1996, about a year and a half after the Pentium 133.
Of course, a Pentium 133 was probably twice the price of the PR133, but the PR133 was the fastest AMD CPU you could get. Early 1997 saw the release of the MMX 166 and MMX 200 and that was the end of the K5.
In April of 1997 they released the K6 and finally they started being competitive both performance wise and also price wise.

The K6 series saved AMD from bankruptcy, had they kept on pushing the K5 for another year they probably wouldn't have recovered.

I just remember that the Nexgen booth at Cebit was incredibly crowded.

Hi Vogon-ites - yes, the K5 is quite the fascinating little paper weight.
Purchased mine from amoretro/"fabulous fabian" and have done a little bit of Doom'ing on it - hoping to post some bench numbers given my schedule permits it.

Added shots, speedsys4.78 scores - testing extended memory fails?
Doom SW 1.9 gives [ 106.7 fps ] - 'doom -nosound -timedemo demo3'

It is definitely not a paperweight. Most CPUs that NASA uses on spacecraft are much slower. People may hammer on about how smartphones today are more powerful than desktop PCs 15 years ago, but I'd still get far more joy and use from a K5 computer than from my Samsung Galaxy S3. You cannot do word-processing, play Starcraft, Diablo or Terminal Velocity on a phone, even if you theoretically can, because some things just need a mouse and a keyboard. It seems to me that computers, or more properly said their use, are turning into stupid toys more and more, people use 3 Ghz i7 machines to post duckface photos on Facebook while the old computing generation solved extreme mathematical and scientific problems on 1960s mainframes slower than a 1980s microcomputer.

Also, most educational and accounting software, at least that from my country, only works on Windows 98 and earlier. In 2008 a teacher was kind enough to let me borrow a whole 166 Mhz Pentium MMX PC for a month because I was preparing for an astronomy competition and the best astronomy software she had did not work on anything higher than a Windows 98 PC.